[Bioclusters] Need some advice on a cluster for EST/cDNA assembly, clustering

[Elia Stupka]

I've been hoping to be able to access large amounts of memory on 
affordable servers for a while, in reality, though, the 4GB OS limit 
has hardly been the issue since unfortunately the cost of memory is 
still very high and hardware vendors seldom offer more than 4GBs per 
processor.

The Sun Opterons are the only ones (among the mainstream vendors) that 
offered us a 4-way option with 32 GBs. The Apple G5s are still limited 
to 8GB (4 per processor, probably when Tiger will be truly released 
they will finally offer more memory slots?), IBM Opterons offer 16GB 
(still only 4GB per processor), the blade versions are always limited 
in memory, etc... then you are left with the usual suspects (Power5s, 
etc.) who have been dealing with more memory for a long time, but at a 
nasty price...

...as long as it costs more to equip hardware with good amounts of 
memory than it costs to buy the hardware, the refinement of 64-bit OS 
for access to large amounts of memory can't take off properly, can it?

Cheers,

Elia


On 27 Feb 2005, at 15:40, Joe Landman wrote:

>
>
> LAI Loong Fong wrote:
>> The process in OSX 10.3 can only see up to 4GB of ram. From what I
>> understand, 10.4 may or may not resolve this issue. I did heard about 
>> people
>> buying from Apple but run YDL instead.
>
> The big issue we keep seeing in 64 linux is running into ABI 
> differences.  There are a few distributions that try to create a 
> "pure" 64 bit or a mixed 64 bit environment, and neither do a perfect 
> job. Usually you see this in terms of broken software 
> installation/builds. Other times libraries are broken, or headers, or 
> paths to the libraries/headers ...
>
> It would help if there were simple methods of tying paths to ABI's.
>
> In terms of the 4GB limit, this is an annoyance today, and I suspect 
> for most folks, will become a major issue in short order.  I think YDL 
> is a RH variant, so hopefully it has support built in (if it was built 
> from the 64 bit ports of RH).  If not, it would be nice if OSX came in 
> an OSX64 (if not today, then soon).
>
> I wonder if that would get compiler support though (the IBM compiler 
> specifically).
>
> Joe
>
>> LAI Loong-Fong
>> _______________________________________________
>> Bioclusters maillist  -  Bioclusters at bioinformatics.org
>> https://bioinformatics.org/mailman/listinfo/bioclusters
>
> -- 
> Joseph Landman, Ph.D
> Scalable Informatics LLC,
> email: landman at scalableinformatics.com
> web  : http://www.scalableinformatics.com
> phone: +1 734 786 8423
>
> _______________________________________________
> Bioclusters maillist  -  Bioclusters at bioinformatics.org
> https://bioinformatics.org/mailman/listinfo/bioclusters